"Smerdyakov" is a Russian expletive, roughly equivalent to "shithead." The character's name likely derives from a character in The Brothers Karamazov.

First page from The Russian Messenger.

The Brothers Karamazov (Russian: Братья Карамазовы Brat'ya Karamazovy, pronounced [ˈbratʲjə karəˈmazəvɨ]) is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and completed in November 1880. Dostoyevsky intended it to be the first part in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner,[1] but he died less than four months after its publication.

Jätän nyt lapsellisuudet, joita tästäkin kommenttilootasta löytyy pilvin pimein, tällä erää tähän.*Smerdyakov was born of "Stinking Lizaveta", a mute woman of the street, from which his name came—"Son of the 'reeking one'". He is widely rumored to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov. When the novel begins, Smerdyakov is Fyodor's lackey and cook. He is morose and sullen, and, like Dostoevsky himself, epileptic.

The only real question for me is very simple: was Fukuyama right or not? That is to say, do we have today antagonisms which, in the long term, can be resolved or at least coped with within the liberal-democratic, capitalist frame. This is the question. The way I see it, unfortunately, is that all the problems that we have -ecological catastrophe, problems of intellectual property and so on- can be solved within the liberal-capitalist framework.

This era is slowly coming to an end. The problem for me is that if we don't want to end up in some kind of neo-authoritarian society, in which we'll have all our private freedoms (you can have sex with animals and so on), but in which the social space will be depoliticized and much more authoritarian - here we should make a pact with liberals (Zizek in New Statesman Interview).

'Objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to the ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since is sustains the very zero level standard against which we perceive things as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious dark matter of physics, the counterpart to an all too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.*Interview by Nick Jackson

Thursday, 24 January 2008

Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Professor Zizek argues that our understanding of violence is wrong.

How do we experience something as violent? We measure it by some zero level of normality. When nothing changes, when things just go on as normal, we say this is zero level, and then when something disturbs this, it is violence.

We should shift the perspective and ask, what if some kind of violence needs to go on to keep things the way they are? What if what we think of as violence is a distraction? To understand this, we must distinguish between subjective violence, systemic violence and symbolic violence.

Subjective violence is violence that is actively done, which can be attributed to a certain subject, such as a murderer, the police, a mob, terrorists – you can see who did it.

Systemic violence is anonymous violence. An example is George Soros. He has done wonderful things with his foundation, but if you look at his market speculation with currencies 10 years ago, what was the effect? Hundreds of thousands losing their jobs in south-east Asia. It was a social tsunami. This is anonymous, systemic violence.

And then you have symbolic violence. Today in the West, there is an obsession with harassment. Anything that another person does to you can be harassment. There is something very violent in this extreme sensitivity to another person's proximity. I'm opposed to the ideology of tolerance, because what we call tolerance is a form of intolerance.

How do we respond to this systemic and symbolic violence? Often I'm for a certain mode of violence. I don't have any problems with Chavez in Venezuela. People accuse Chavez of being too dictatorial. But he is not intervening in a zero violence space. He is intervening in a violent system. And the only way to intervene is to be counter-violent.

At other times, the most violent thing is to do nothing. Take feminism in traditional masculine societies: what seems like a non-violent patriarchal relationship relies on violence. The most important thing is not to protest, but not to participate. The first feminist text is Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

Sometimes you can disturb things most just by no longer participating, by stepping back. I'm not saying just do nothing, but undertake an active non-participation. In my sense, Gandhi was very violent. Of course, he wasn't violent in the sense of subjective violence, but, by not participating, he disturbed things, he prevented things functioning normally.

PS.

Critiquing the liberal concept of pacifism as the rejection of all forms of subjective violence, Zizek instead implores the endorsement of forms of emancipatory violence, as ‘To chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.’ (p174) The argument here is that by colluding with the social, economic and political conditions of massive inequality and extreme poverty, people are perpetrating forms of systemic violence which breeds the necessary qualities of resentment and anger which cause the subjective violence abhorred by pacifists. What Zizek claims is necessary then, is a systemic transformation to eliminate or at least minimise the systemic violence endemic to globalised capitalism.

Consequently, Zizek argues that ‘Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.’ (p183) In situations where everyday life perpetuates a cycle of poverty and misery for others – often those who have laboured to produce goods consumed in the first world, but also marginalised groups within western nations – the most violent thing a person can do is to simply ignore this systemic violence and lead an uneventful life, claiming to hate violence while creating the conditions of a society which produce it.

NS: What relationship, if any, do you think your work has to the mainstream, normative, liberal political philosophy done in English and American universities?

SZ: I noticed something -- maybe I'm just generalising this; I don't know to what extent this is a rule-- I noticed how many of the people who consider themselves to be more radical than the liberal standard, the left-liberal standard, most of them do not work in political philosophy properly but, as it were, hide themselves as literary critics or philosophers. It's as if it's an excess which requires you to change genre. Another tendency of these "radicals" is moralization connected with legalization. It's a certain pose in which they want to deliver the message that they are really more radical. But this excess of radicality only concretely articulates itself in some kind of a general moralistic outrage -- "what are we doing to immigrants?!" I think they often tend to be a little bit hypocritical. I always read the liberal anti-communists, liberal leftists - they're interesting, one can learn from them. I read a wonderful essay by Orwell from 1938. There he has a wonderful analysis of the typical leftist liberal. He says they ask for a change, but they do it in a hypocritical way: they ask for a change but it's almost as if to make sure that no real change will happen.

Don't you suspect a little bit that there's something of this in today's typical radical liberal - in today's anti-immigrant campaign for instance? The standard idea is to say, like my friend Alain Badiou in France, "those who are here are from here". That is to say, no check for roots, open to all of them. Legalize everything. The problem is that they know very well that this radical opening will never happen. So it's very easy to have a radical position which costs you nothing and for the price of nothing it gives you some kind of moral superiority. It also enables them to avoid the truly difficult questions. For example, my conflict with my radical leftist friends is when they want total openness and so on. I say to them, are you aware that anti-immigrant are mostly spontaneous, lower working-class attitudes? They talk as if some big imperialist power centre decides to be against immigrants. No! If anything, capital is more liberal about immigrants. So, I think this is not a good thing - I think of all these theorists, like Giddens and Held, who are left-wing, but left within the establishment ...

NS: Would you say that thinkers of that sort, establishment leftists if you like, are insufficiently materialist?

SZ: Exactly, exactly. Apart from their very general anti-capitalist thunder -this is my biggest reproach to them. Despite the financial crisis, we do not have a serious leftist attempt to deal with what, in old Marxist terms, we called the critique of political economy. It's obvious to me that Marx has to be repeated, but repeated not as he was. Isn't it clear today that with all the problems of natural resources, intellectual property and so on, that the whole notion of exploitation, if it has any meaning at all should be radically redefined? I don't see enough work of this sort. I think it's either some kind of an abstract, moralistic politics where you focus on groups which are obviously under-privileged -other races, gays and so on- and then you can explode in all your moralistic rage. Or, another thing that I really hate as a leftist who tries to be a communist - did you notice how the standard academic left likes nothing more than an attempted revolution going on, but far away from where you are? Today it's Venezuela, which is why I like to be critical from time to time of Chavez. It's a very comfortable position: you can do all the dirty work, you struggle for your career, compromises in your country in the west, but your heart is somewhere far away but it in no way affects what you are doing. This is another thing which I think is a fake.

So, if anything was proven by this financial crisis, it is that apart from left-radical Keynesians like Paul Krugman, with whom I'm sympathetic, I don't see any serious counter-proposal by the left.

NS: So we have lost the political economy in Marx?

SZ: There are some marginal good signs - Moishe Postone is one of the few people who really asks the question, what to do with Marx's political economy today? Then there are of course some economists and so on - David Harvey, for example, But the question is not properly addressed and that's very sad. If you read the predominant cultural left, you'd have thought that Marx's Capital is some kind of treatise on commodity fetishism and other cultural phenomena. Sorry, but Marx meant it as a critical theory of society, giving a diagnosis and so on. I think things today call for analysis. Let me give me your analysis - don't be afraid, I will be short.

I claim that we have two opponents: pro-capitalist liberals and old Marxists, as far as they still exist. They claim that it's the same capitalism going on. This is obviously not true - in China and other places, something new is emerging. Then you have all these, I call them, ironically, "post-theorists" - like Giddens, for example. I claim that their work is, unfortunately, a journalistic patchwork. Many leftists say: we know what is wrong - capitalism, imperialism. We just don't know how to mobilise people; the problem is political. But I think we don't know what's going on.

This is typical theoretical arrogance. We don't know what is going on. This is the point of my book: terrific new things are emerging. What's going on in China today is something very ominous. Here I disagree with liberals who say, wait for another ten years and we'll have another Tiananmen in China. I doubt it. Something genuinely new is emerging today in the guise of what are ridiculously called "Asian values", authoritarian capitalism. A capitalism which, we can see now, is doing better in the crisis than the west. A capitalism that is more dynamic and efficient than our Western, liberal capitalism, but precisely as such functions perfectly with an authoritarian state. My pessimism is that this is the future. This is what I think we should watch. This is why I wrote that piece about Berlusconi [in the LRB], which many people thought was crazy - Berlusconi's still democratically elected, after all. But I see signs of this new authoritarianism. There's a kind of total devaluation of politics. Of course, this new post-democratic capitalism will take different forms. There will be Asian values, more traditionally authoritarian; in Russia, it's emerging; in Italy, it's emerging in its own way. This is the fear. We who pretend in some way to be more radical, where we should make a pact with honest liberals is precisely along this axis: we should all be aware that what was precious in the liberal democratic legacy. What, for example, Hannah Arendt noticed in the US during the Vietnam War. What fascinated her was the level of public debate - people in town meetings debating. This is disappearing.

NS: Arendt thought political participation was an intrinsic good didn't she?

SZ: The problem I have with her is that she dismissed the economy as the space of truth, so to speak. For her, the economy was just utilitarian stuff. The authentic big politics doesn't happen there for her. But we need what Marx called a political economy. You know the basic Marxist insight that politics is not just politics - politics is in the economy. We should rehabilitate this. Isn't this becoming clear? And here's somewhere else where I don't agree with many leftists: you know this Toni Negri mantra - "Empire", nation states no longer matter and so on. It's crazy. If there is a lesson from so-called postmodern, post-68 capitalism, it's that the regulatory role of the state is getting stronger. So much for this stupid story, the state disappearing etc. Not true! More and more if you want to have a company today, you have to be so deeply entwined with the state apparatus.

This is was the point of my big fight with Simon Critchley. I think it's too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let's withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I'm an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible. This is why I supported - ok, my support doesn't mean anything, but as a public gesture- Obama. I think the battle that he is fighting now for healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The real core of the anti-Obama campaign is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is how freedom of choice is something beautiful, but works only against a very thick background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. This is the problem. As I like to emphasise here in the States, there are freedoms of choice which I am glad to renounce. I like to do a parallel between healthcare and water and electricity. Yes, you can say I don't have a choice in choosing my water provider. It's imposed by where I live. But, my god, I gladly renounce this choice. I prefer to have some basic choices made by society - water, electricity, and some elementary healthcare. This precisely opens up the choice, opens up the freedom for other choices. Another important thing, and here I agree with that great British sceptic, John Gray (I don't agree with his conclusions), who says today we are forced to live "as if" we are free. We are all the time bombarded choices -and he's not making the old, boring Marxist point that these are inessential choices. No, the point is rather that you are obliged to choose without even having the background qualification to make the choice.

My position isn't that we should sit down and wait for some big revolution to come. We have to engage wherever we can. If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of a blow will made against this freedom of choice ideology, it will be a great victory worth having fought for.

NS: Those short-term gains shouldn't be underestimated?

SZ: No. That was Critchley's misunderstanding of me: as if I wanted to sit down and dream of a big revolution. All I'm saying is that one should distinguish between short-term battles worth fighting and short-term battles where your protest is of the kind that those in power like. There was a little bit of that in the marches against the Iraq war. Everyone was satisfied. Those who organised the protests knew they wouldn't change anything. Blair like the protests - he or Bush said, you see, this is what we want in Iraq: a society in which people will be able to protest like we do. So, one should be very careful when doing something which appears as a protest measure. How does it really function? And it's not difficult. If you look closely, you always know what you are doing.

NS: You're talking about the ideological function of protest.

SZ: More than ever, the battle to be won is ideological. I don't mean in any obscure, pseudo-Marxist sense - it's a very spontaneous ideology. But isn't it interesting that the most influential public intellectual in political matters is Noam Chomsky, who knows practically nothing about political theory. I met a guy who recently had lunch with Chomsky and he told me that Chomsky said something very sad: Chomsky said that today we don't need theory. Power is cynical and all we need to to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree. I don't think you just have to tell the truth in this factual sense. Truth in the sense of facts - facts are facts and they are precious, but they can work this way or that. A nice example here: there is a new generation of Israeli historians who are much more open about Jewish violence against Arabs before independence. And people say, "my god, they are telling the truth!" But this truth was easily appropriated by zionists, who say, "you see, that's how you fight wars - we had to do it." If you don't change the ideological background, facts alone don't do the job.

NS: That's an argument for theory in the critical sensethen?

SZ: Yes, sorry: I'm an old fashioned continental European! Theory is sacred, we need it more than ever.

NS: The first chapter of your new book is called "It's Ideology, Stupid!" And it strikes me that ideology is, for you, the most important conceptual tool bequeathed to us by Marx.

SZ: Yes, but if you read the concept of ideology the way I develop it in my other books, I'm critical of Marx. Ideology is not so-called "superstructure", a shadowy realm and real things are happening elsewhere. For me, the core of Marx's theory of ideology is not to be found in the German Ideology, and those stupid, simplistic, youthful works, which are totally outdated. But in Capital, when Marx speaks about commodity fetishism, he speaks about fetishism as some kind of ideology, even if he doesn't use the term ideology. Here Marx outgrew his early simplicities, the distinction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. This is the lesson of this crisis. Even intelligent neo-conservatives recognise that we are in deadlock and there is no way out. Someone like Fukuyama asks to what extent the functioning of the economy rests on people's ideological attitudes - whether they trust each other, what they think and so on. One big false rumour can practically ruin a small country today. So, I'm not saying that everything dissolves into psychology or whatever. No, the trick is precisely to see what extent the economy itself, in order to function, has to rely on the fact of ideological attitudes. And this is what fascinates me.

I don't have answers. When people ask me what we should do about ecology, the financial crisis - my god, what do I know? What I can do, as a critical intellectual, is to ask the right questions. Sometimes the way you formulate or perceive a problem can be itself be part of the problem. The classical example is tolerance. Why is it that we today automatically translate or perceive problems of racism or sexism into problems of tolerance.

SZ: Yes, but on the other hand, but look at the great anti-racist struggle of Martin Luther King. He never uses the word "tolerance". For him it would have been ridiculous to say that we blacks want more "tolerance" from the whites. I think it has something to do with what you might call our cultural, post-political capitalism, in which the most passionate struggles are cultural struggles. A large majority of the left doesn't question liberal democracy and capitalism as such. In the same way that when we were young we wanted socialism with a human face, for a large part of today's left, what they want is global capitalism with a human face. This is why the only way you can perceive problems is to transform or transpose them into cultural problems. I don't find this self-evident. Critical intellectuals today should be working to enable people to raise the right questions.

NS: Unlike mainstream political philosophers, you're not that interested in the question of legitimacy are you?

SZ: This focus on legitimate power is the topic on which I would definitely not focus. It's not the topic that I think is crucial. I don't despise democracy, but, for me, democracy, in the formal sense, is precious but it is not in itself a measure of any infinite truth, authenticity or whatever. It's something precious, I know, but we all know this. You can have elections where people get seduced by right-wing populists. And here I'm an unashamed anarchist. I'm ready to say here that the result in some way untrue or false. Even Karl Popper said this. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't fetishise democracy. I'm ready to claim that you can have democratic elections where the majority for a rightist populist and that you have the right to treat that government as illegitimate. I don't think that this formal democratic procedure as such should be taken as equalling legitimacy.

NS: Let's talk about the left's response to the financial crisis. The left has consoled itself with the idea that this crisis is some grand ideological opportunity. Whereas you write that the main victim of the crisis will not be capitalism but the left itself.

SZ: Yes. In the long term, it will work as yet another shock therapy, in the Naomi Klein sense. A kind of shattering of the system which, in the long run, will help make capitalism leaner and meaner. The battle is not lost in advance, however. In the US, for example, what is important is to make acceptable the idea of large, collective actions. We should make this idea acceptable. I'm not saying everything is lost. It's an open battle. Let's not be seduced by the simple idea that this is a crisis and we can use this opportunity to impose our agenda. When the economy is in crisis, the first reaction of the people is to cling to their fundamental principles. So you get this renewed social-demoractic welfarism in the US - Krugman, Stiglitz etc. But at the same time, there was an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. So, it's a battle and we should be aware that battles are always difficult. The only serious true serious proposal that we know about is, on the one hand this Krugman-Stiglitz leftist Keynesianism, and on the other this idea, popularised in Europe and latin America, of basic income. I like it as an idea but I think it's too much of an ideological utopia. For structural reasons, it can't work. It's the last desperate attempt to make capitalism work for socialist ends. The guy who developed it, Robert Van Parijs, openly says that this is the only way to legitimise capitalism. Apart from these two, I don't see anything else.

NS: Van Parijs is associated, as you know, with analytical Marxism. And I was wondering what you make of that strain of Marxist theory?

SZ: I know some British guys and I had a debate with them. It's the same problem with John Rawls. Rawls himself, when he was confronted with his critics, admitted one thing: that his model of distributive justice, the difference principle etc, works on one fateful condition: that there is no resentment. That is to say, given the way we are libidinally structured in modern societies, envy and resentment are crucial. Rawls doesn't take into account the irrationality of envy. Capitalism takes much better of it. Although these analytical Marxists want to be "no-bullshit" analysts, the ultimate image of human being it is based on is way too naïve and utopian. I don't think the socialist project can be reduced to this. But nonetheless I claim that in capitalist relations today, envy is crucial. Never underestimate the power of envy. This is a psychoanalytic insight.

NS: I want to ask you finally about what you follow Alain Badiou in calling the "Communist Hypothesis". You say that the great barrier to the realisation of that hypothesis being the problem of agency. Do you see a new revolutionary agent actor on the horizon?

SZ: No, no. But let me clearly define to you the limits of my communism. My problem with Badious is that he totally dismisses the economy as a site of political struggle. The only real question for me is very simple: was Fukuyama right or not? That is to say, do we have today antagonisms which, in the long term, can be resolved or at least coped with within the liberal-democratic, capitalist frame. This is the question. The way I see it, unfortunately, is that all the problems that we have -ecological catastrophe, problems of intellectual property and so on- can be solved within the liberal-capitalist framework. This era is slowly coming to an end. The problem for me is that if we don't want to end up in some kind of neo-authoritarian society, in which we'll have all our private freedoms (you can have sex with animals and so on), but in which the social space will be depoliticized and much more authoritarian - here we should make a pact with liberals. Only a more fundamental questioning of our society can save us. It's clear that we are approaching some kind of apocalyptic zero-point. So, no, I don't see any immediate agent. I see tendencies of proletarianization. By proletarianization I mean people being reduced almost to a kind of Cartesian zero-level - you are a free agent but deprived of substance. Then it's a question of coalitions, how to do it. My unconditional insight is that we will be pushed into a situation where we will have to make a choice: either we do something or we are slowly approaching a society I'm not sure I'd like to live in.*http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalismNoam Chomsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

JUAN GONZALEZ: We continue on the subject of the financial crisis with a man the National Review calls “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West.” The New York Times calls him “the Elvis of cultural theory.” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. His latest, just out from Verso, is called First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. It analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.

Žižek’s latest offering, also excerpted in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, opens with the words, quote, “The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was unpredictable.” He goes on to recall how the demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank over the past decade all protested the ways in which banks were playing with money and warned of an impending crash. They were met with tear gas and mass arrests.

AMY GOODMAN: The message, he writes, was, quote, “loud and clear, and the police were used to literally stifle the truth.”Well, Slavoj Žižek addressed a full house at Cooper Union here in New York City on Wednesday night and joins us now in our firehouse studio.Welcome to Democracy Now!

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Thanks very much. It’s my pleasure.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Relate the protest to the—

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: You are even better than Fox News, which I usually watch. More amusing.

AMY GOODMAN: Relate the protests to the meltdown and why—how it was predictable.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: No, what interests me is, for example, Paul—sorry, Paul Krugman said basically the same thing, which tells us a lot about how ideology works today. He said, what if we make a mental experiment, and all the leading bank people, managers and so on, were to know how it would end two years ago? He said, let’s not delude ourselves; there would have been no change. They would have acted in exactly the same way.

This brings me, as a psychoanalyst, into the play, because I think this makes us aware as to what extent our everyday dealing is controlled by what in psychoanalysis we call the mechanism of fetishist disavowal. “Je sais bien, mais quand même…” “I know very well, but…” You know, we can know very well the possible catastrophic consequences, but somehow you trust the market, you think things will somehow work out, and so on and so on. It’s absolutely crucial to analyze this, not only in economy, but generally. This is the focus of my work: how beliefs function today. What do we mean when we say that someone believes?

So that I don’t get lost, let me tell you a wonderful story, which is my favorite story. I quote it also in the book. You know Niels Bohr, Copenhagen, quantum physics guy. You know, once he was visited in his country house by a friend who saw above the entrance a horseshoe, you know, in Europe, the superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And the friend, also a scientist, asked him, “But listen, do you really believe in this?” Niels Bohr said, “Of course not. I’m not an idiot. I’m a scientist.” Then the friend asked him, “But why do you have it there?” You know what Niels Borh answered? He said, “I don’t believe in it, but I have it there, horseshoe, because I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody. You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no? Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean? You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to ask you, you say you are also critical of the progressive or the left response here. You say in your article in Harper’s, “There is a real possibility that the primary victim of the ongoing crisis will not be capitalism but the left itself, insofar as its inability to offer a viable global alternative was again made visible to everyone.” Could you elaborate?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I am a radical leftist. I like to call myself, in a very conditional way, a communist even. But I think one should, as a leftist, really concede the amount of the defeat of the left in the last twenty years. That’s the sine qua non condition of a possible review. So, yes, apart from very sympathetic things suggested by people like Stiglitz, Krugman, which are basically a return to Keynesian welfare state, and apart from some interesting—but I don’t think they are the solution—economic ideas, like the basic income or so-called renta básica in Brazil, basic rent, which is a utopia of its own, I think, I sometimes, apart from this, have a strange paranoiac idea that maybe this crisis was manufactured so that people will see that even if there is a crisis, the left really doesn’t have a global answer.

I see—what worries me is two things about the left. First, it’s more and more legalistic moralization. You know, it’s kind of a pure form of protest against injustice. Then the only thing you can do is legal forums and so on. In this sense, many of the ex-leftists are getting depoliticized. They no longer ask the truly basic questions. Like even now, all the outcry was, “Oh, those bank profiteers,” and so on. I totally agree with what we just heard. But don’t you think that the truth is a little bit more complex, in the sense of—you know much more about this than me, but the way I see it is that one of the roots of the present crisis is not just greed. It’s that after the digital bubble at the beginning of our millennium, the idea was how to keep prosperity, how to keep economy alive. And it was, as far as I remember, even a little bit of a really bipartisan decision: let’s make it easier in real estate, and so on, to keep it moving.

So, you know, there is a structural problem beneath all this psychological topic of the greedy bankers, which is, that’s how capitalism works, my God, which is why even concerning our beloved model—Bernard Madoff, no?—I didn’t like it how they focused on him. Wait a minute. He was just the radical version of where the system is pushing you. Now, I’m not saying—I’m not crazy—“which is why we need to nationalize all banks and introduce immediately socialist dictatorship" or what. What I’m just saying is, let’s not get rid of the problem by too easily making it into a psychological problem. You know, you can be an evil guy, but there must be very precise institutional, economic, and so on, coordinates, background, which allows you to do what you do.

The second thing, I also didn’t like the cry shared by left and right-wing populists of “help the Main Street, not the Wall Street.” Well, sorry, but those bank managers who emphasized, in capitalism there is no Main Street without Wall Street. In today’s industry, because of the competition and immense investment into new inventions and so on, without large accessibility, availability of credits, there is no prosperous Main Street. So this is a false choice. So, again, with all respect for the left and so on, I think we should avoid quick moralization, if we mean it seriously.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, “Is the bailout then really a ‘socialist’ measure? If it is, it takes a peculiar form: a ‘socialist’ measure whose primary aim is to help not the poor but the rich, not those who borrow but those who lend.”

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah. I mean, this is my whole thesis, that capitalism always was socialism for those who are on the top. This is the basic paradox of it, no?

AMY GOODMAN: What about healthcare?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Oh, now you touch my favorite topic. You know why? Because I think that here we see, when people—when I write on ideology, and people laugh at me—“Haha, didn’t you know this? We live in post-ideological era.” No, here you see ideology in its material force. We can—we should distinguish here two levels. On the one hand are those ridiculous right-wing paranoias, which, incidentally, I like to listen. They amuse me, you know, like that Sarah Palin idea of death panels. Some mysterious bureaucracy will decide, does your uncle live or not. That’s funny, I hope; at least for the time being, we can laugh at it. But then—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Not in a big part of America, unfortunately.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then the real problem, where the Republican critique of healthcare plan really works is by appealing to this basic gut notion of freedom of choice. And I think this is a problem; we have to confront it. The first we should make it clear is that in order to exercise the freedom of choice—one has to repeat this again and again—an extremely—to really exercise this, an extremely complex network of social, legal regulations, even, I would say, ethical rules, which are somehow accepted, and so on, has to be—have to be here. In other words, often less choice, at least less public choice, at a certain level means more choice at a different level.

Let me return precisely to healthcare. My idea is that healthcare should be at a certain level, like water and electricity. You can also say that you usually don’t choose your water supplier, no? OK, now we can play the Republican game and say, “What a horrible terror! They are depriving us of the fundamental choice to choose the water supply.” But we somehow accept that there are some things where it is much more practical that you are able to count on them. Sorry, but I gladly refuse the big freedom to choose my water supplier, the same as for electricity, although there things can get more tricky. Why not add to this series health? Europe demonstrates it can be done effectively, not to diminish our freedom, but to leave you much more space of much more greater actual freedom, and so on.

So, you see, this is the danger of this ideology of choice, because, you know, this is, in one sense, a central category today. There is an old Marxist card, which is played again and again, of we are only offered false choices, not real choices, like Pepsi or Coke, whatever, instead of the real choices. OK, there is a truth in it. But there is also another problem of ideology of choice, that often we are bombarded by choices—you really are free to choose—without being given the proper background to make a reasonable choice. John Gray, the British cynical skeptic, whom I otherwise admire, wrote very nicely that we are today more and more forced to act as if we are free. And this causes a lot of anxiety and so on. You know, one should be very specific apropos of choices. I’m all for the freedom of choice. I would just like to see the small—those, you know, in the footnote, the small print, what are the precise conditions of choice, and so on and so on.

And so, again, although I have no illusions about what Obama can do and so on, I am still proud that already before elections I supported him, although this had no great impact here, of course. But in contrast to my very more radical leftist friends whose motto was “he’s just a nice human face on the same imperialism,” “he will even serve better the interest of capitalism,” or whatever, no, I think we see now, apropos the healthcare reform, that we are fighting the central battle here.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, in terms of the somewhat pessimistic view you have of how the response to the crisis has been, there seems to be, continues to be, an entire continent that is heading in a somewhat different direction, South America and Latin America, in general.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Here comes my critical leftism.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d love hear it, in terms—because there does seem to be in many of these areas, while the rest of the world is—the gap is increasing, at least there are governments throughout Latin America that are trying to decrease the gap and take a different role.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: They are trying. Are they really doing it? You know, I am—this is my skeptic. Some people already accuse me of being a covert neoconservative for what I will say now. Let’s not have any illusions. I claim that much of the attraction of the recent wave, Hugo Chavez and so on, of Latin American populism comes from this old desire of the left. Let’s be clear, many leftists today in the United States are relatively well-paid academics who fight all the dirty department career war, but they like to feel warm in their hearts. So it’s good to have as far away as possible another country where you can sympathize. “Oh, but things are really happening there.” You know, at some point in the ‘30s it was Soviet Union, Cuba, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Nicaragua. I’m afraid now that it is Venezuela a little bit. And I don’t buy the standard liberal critique, Chavez dictator and so on.

I just think Chavez started well. He did something of world historical importance. As far as I know, he was the first one of truly trying to mobilize people who were in favelas and so on, who were excluded from the public domain. He really tried to bring them into the political process. I claim if we don’t find a way to do this, we are slowly approaching a kind of a new apartheid society, where we will live in a kind of a permanent low-level civil war, where we will have some kind of irrational explosions like in France, the car burning in the Paris suburbs.

On the other hand, I’m a little bit more pessimistic as to what in the long term he will really achieve. I think he is now losing his way approaching this standard Latin American populism, where he, because of the oil wealth, is allowed to play the game of fiddle with oil, fiddle with money. I think, if you ask me, a much more interesting phenomenon is Bolivia. It’s much more authentic. They’re really being forced to invent something new. I always think that the genuinely utopian moments are not when you are doing OK and why not even better, are when you are in a deadlock. Then, in order even to survive normally, you are forced to invent something. But I thought you would say entire—so, no, I don’t see too much hope in Latin America.

But I see more hope at this moment with you in United States than with Europe. Europe is now, I think, in great decline. I had some hopes about Europe. Why? Because, to put it very simply, it still looks that we have two models now which are in competition, if I simplify the analysis very much: the Anglo-Saxon liberal market model and what we poetically call capitalism with Asian values, which means authoritarian capitalism. This is what every leftist, as I repeat it, should worry about, because let’s concede to the devil what belongs to the devil. Wasn’t it that, ’til recently—I’m sorry to tell you again, as a strange communist, you will say—there was one good argument for capitalism? After. It may have been that capitalism needed dictatorship for ten, twenty years—Chile, South Korea—but when things started to move, capitalism always engendered a push toward some kind of democracy. No longer. I claim that what is now emerging in the Far East started—it started in Singapore, this kind of so-called, again, authoritarian capitalism. I think something new is emerging: a capitalism even more dynamic—